


Glitter in the Dark

by kizuke



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:25:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4139223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kizuke/pseuds/kizuke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura's not just the girl who waits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glitter in the Dark

Clint first sees Laura half-illuminated by the edge of a spotlight. She would be bright under the lights of the ring, he thinks, circled by the glinting edges of his throwing knives, and so he calls, “The lady in green? Yes, you. Come right up.”

She fairly leaps to the front, and when he asks if she’s scared, she says, “Of ‘The Amazing Hawkeye’?” with a tiny mocking lilt. She looks him and his knives right in the face, smiling with all her pearl teeth, and never flinches for a second.

He meets her after the show to give her a prize for participating. She’s not any sort of fighter, it turns out. She’s a girl in a boarding school twenty minutes out of town, a rich girl, nobody he should have anything to do with. But there’s fight in this girl, he thinks, and when she gives him her number he doesn’t say no.

He never calls her, though, because he doesn’t have to. Ten days later, she turns up in front of his caravan in the pouring rain, her white school socks soaked to the calf with mud, brown hair bedraggled. “My folks are dead,” she says. “Take me in. I’ll do anything.”

“You’ve got a trust fund, probably,” Clint says, just in case she doesn’t know, and has walked from the next town over nothing.

“I don’t want any of it,” she says, shivering with cold. “Their house, with no one in it. No.” So Clint holds open his caravan door, like a gentleman. When she’s huddled by the heater, he wraps his mother’s old red quilt around her shoulders, tassels and all.

He expects to have to fight for her, but she doesn’t need it - picking up as quickly as she does on what to do, who to curry favour with, how to speak, in order for everyone to forget that she had ever been anything but carnie. 

(“Laura,” he says, waving vaguely at her, when his brother comes back from fuck knows where doing fuck knows what. “Barney.”

“Hello, where did you come from?” Barney asks, looking her up and down, smirking, and before Clint’s skin can even start to crawl, Laura smiles up at Barney coquettishly before punching him right in the gut.)

“Why did you come here?” he asks her, long months after she stops looking quite so determined and starts looking more comfortable. 

“I don’t know,” she said, “just, something about this felt right.”

“Hm,” he says, looking around at the bustle around him. Like the sight down an arrow, maybe, when you think, this will hit dead centre, and it does.

*

“You sure about this?” he asks her again. When he shuts his eyes and thinks of her, she’s sitting at a fire ringed by all their friends, telling a story, laughing, her hair bright in the dancing light. This farm, green as far as the eye can see, is not that.

She closes her eyes and breathes out slowly before answering. “Clint Barton,” she says, touching her slowly-rounding belly. “I chose this. Why do you keep asking if I’ve changed my mind?”

He doesn’t really know - he wants to shrug and look away, but makes himself keep his eyes on hers. “You could go anywhere, do anything - is this you? Is it where you want to be? Because I - ”

She’s shaking her head. “What - raising our child, running our farm, you think it’s beneath me? That it’s not important work?”

He grabs her hand, holds it close until she leans against him. “No, no, just - I don’t know.” He looks out at all of it, at their unfamiliar home. “Just, this - when I’m away, isn’t this a house with no one in it?”

She squeezes his hand, then tugs at it. “Come on,” she says, with that little mocking lilt he loves, and leads him away from the deck and back inside. She opens the chest of stuff they brought - it’s a big chest, but as it’s more or less all they have, it’s not much. She takes out his mother’s big old quilt and flings it haphazardly over the sofa.

“There,” she says. “This house is ours,” - and she sounds so self-satisfied and cocksure that Clint can’t help but laugh. 

“It’s a house that’s full of us. You, me, our kid. _Kids_ ,” - she touches her belly again - “things from our past, things from our future. You’ll fiddle with bits of the house between missions until it’s all how you like it.”

“I’ll get SHIELD to collect some of your mum and dad’s things from your lawyers, bring them down,” Clint says.

“I’ll put your old bow up above the mantelpiece.”

“I’ll paint the baby’s room purple.”

“Lilac,” Laura says. “And I won’t ever be alone, because you’re here with me.”

“Always,” Clint says immediately. “And you’re with me.” Then he wrinkles his nose.

“We’re disgusting,” Laura agrees, laughing.

“Speak for yourself.”

“Okay. I’m disgusting. You’re repulsive.”

Clint staggers theatrically onto the couch. Laura flops nonchalantly over his flailing limbs. 

"I'll build you a sunroom," Clint says. 

"We have a deck," Laura says. "Do we really need a sunroom?" She pauses. "Do you even know what a sunroom is?"

"I'll find out and build you one."

She prods him in the arm. "Maybe a greenhouse."

"Alright, a greenhouse," he agrees, smiling through a yawn. 

"Repulsive," she whispers, but then she kisses him, so she probably doesn't mean it.


End file.
